Sunday, March 21, 2010

The Tank Twilight Zone

Somewhere, in an Azjol-Nerub instance, a paladin tank and a death knight tank both zoned in for a 5-man heroic. The healer and two DPS scratched their heads and wondered if they were still in Northrend or in a Tank Twilight Zone.

Minutes later, in the fastest run they ever saw, the group stood over the corpse of Anub'arak. The rest of the group said thank you but the two tanks were still yammering in group chat.

"Geez, why'd you taunt the bat away from the healer, I totally had him!" said the death knight.

"LOLZ. Let's talk about fairness when you lose that ghoul army of yours. You don't see me calling the rest of the Argent Crusade as back up," countered the paladin.

***

You porkers know the drill. Put two tanks together and they can't help but argue who's the best at AoE tanking, single-target tanking, effective health, moving threat generation, etc.

For those hoping these pissing contests will end by Cataclysm--better luck next expansion. Seems Blizzard wants to keep the tank trash talk alive if only to keep them all raid viable.

"... [W]e don't think well-defined tank niches are very good for the game. We've even backed off of well-defined healing niches and we'll continue to do so even more in Cataclysm," according to a blue post from Ghostcrawler.

Ghostcrawler explained that tank specialization can pigeonhole each class into certain types of dungeons. Imagine as a pally tank to only be wanted for Culling of Stratholme --won't that be a bummer?Instead, Blizzard seems to be focusing on differentiating each tank on their talents and abilities. This can be seen in the new thread from Blizzard poster Nethaera, which asks for feedback on how tanking cooldowns can be made "fun and useful" for Cataclysm.